


Scientist and Daydreamer

by theunwillingheart



Category: Wolf's Rain
Genre: Cycles of the World, F/M, Gen, The Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-10
Updated: 2017-05-10
Packaged: 2018-10-30 11:09:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10875522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theunwillingheart/pseuds/theunwillingheart
Summary: Thirty years are stripped away—the divorce, the doctors’ visits—and they find themselves children, playing amid the ruins.Cher looks toward the future.Spoilers for Episode 27: Where the Soul Goes.





	Scientist and Daydreamer

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: _Wolf’s Rain_ is not mine. If it were mine, it would have _ended differently, darn it_ (and been a much worse story for it).

“Farewell, ‘Island of Dreams’,” says Hubb, “more like ‘Island of Nightmares’, am I right?”

Cher laughs harder and longer than the lame crack merits.  She had forgotten how funny Hubb could be, even when he wasn’t trying to be.  _Especially_ when he wasn’t trying to be.

They’re hobbling along under a tattered blanket, their eyes fixed on the horizon.  Behind them lies the failed Paradise that was Jaguara’s keep.  Ahead of them, there are no more cities—just the unforgiving wilderness, the distant mountain.

Cher doesn’t know how they’re still going—longer than the spangled Nobles, longer than the armed militiamen.  She is worn down by cold and endless miles and the pinching of her ridiculous white pumps.  She wants to take them off and just go barefoot, but she doesn’t.  Top tier researcher or not, she is still a lady.  Ladies wear their shoes, even if they are uncomfortable.  _Especially_ if they are uncomfortable.  Besides, the ground is frozen, and frostbite is not a good look on anyone.

“As long as we’re together, Cher, it doesn’t matter.”  Hubb is so happy, so happy.  She wants to be happy for him.  Is she allowed to still want things, at the end of the world?

The wind screams its way around them, and it sounds like the child they could never have.

 

The old sheriff from Kyrios is sprawled in the ice and snow, his dog curled up beneath him, radiating heat.

Cher takes his pulse, looks into his eyes, palpates his skull with deft, skilled hands.  She can’t feel any fractures, but that doesn’t mean that his brain is intact.  She looks up and shakes her head sadly at Hubb.  It’s strange to see Quent looking so feeble and defeated—he had always been such a bull of a man.  She can still remember a conversation they had shared, days back, when Hubb had stepped out to fill the tank of his car.

“Looks like we caught our fox,” Quent had said with gruff amusement.

 _Fox?_ Cher had thought.“Careful,” she had warned him.  At the outset of her venture, undertaken alongside trackers and soldiers, she had learned to set boundaries early and often.

“Ah, you're tougher than you look!” Quent had chuckled easily.  “I can see why he likes you.  I take it that you wore the pants in the relationship?”

Cher had smiled archly.  “ _Wore?_ ”

Their laughter had been loud enough to be heard for miles around.

Now, even if they could have laughed, there is no one left to hear it.

 

Outside, their armored vehicle is flanked by a pack of running wolves.

Cher cradles the pale girl in her arms protectively.  Even now, she can’t stop looking at Cheza in wonder and disbelief.  Years of painstaking research, of tweaking growth media and measuring potentials, and all it had taken was the blood of a wolf.  Who could have known?

 _The old fairytales, maybe,_ Cher thinks, bemused.  Scientist and daydreamer.

Cher is not sure what she wants to say to this strange girl, weakening and wilting right at the height of her youth.  But an apology, perhaps, would not go amiss.

“I’m sorry if we hurt you,” she says finally.  Of course, _she_ had not done anything excessive or cruel, but Lord Orkham had never been known for his tenderness, the filthy old lech.  Who knows what his team had been up to, before Cher had been brought on?

Cheza shakes her head drowsily, her eyes closed.  “This One was not hurt,” she murmurs, in that lilting, childlike voice.  “This One… was merely waiting.”

“So were we all,” says Cher, and it isn’t until she’s said it that she realizes how true it is.  “So were we all.”

 

Cheza has fallen back asleep.  Cher looks out the window of the vehicle.  Once more she finds herself thinking, uncomfortably, of Lord Darcia.  She doesn’t know where he is, or what he’s been planning.  (Can one have plans, at the end of the world?)  She doesn’t want to find out what might happen, should they cross paths again.

 _When we cross paths_ , she thinks dully, and the untraceable foreknowledge disturbs her.  Has she suddenly grown wise beyond her knowing?  Or was this small voice always within her, waiting for enough silence to be heard?  Cher watches her breath mist out into the frigid air and lets her thoughts float away with it.

In the middle of all the hype and bustle of her old life, she had remained naïve to the hidden rhythms of the world.  Unknowingly, she and everyone she knew had danced along to the repetitive refrain that was just out of hearing.  She is beginning to see now that these events had been not only foretold but also unwittingly rehearsed— in their hearts, in their bodies.  Only now, when it is final call and curtains closed, is the true design being revealed in all its cold elegance.

 

Cher takes Hubb’s hand, and for a perfect moment, everything is fine.  Thirty years are stripped away—the divorce, the doctors’ visits—and they find themselves children, playing amid the ruins.

That’s when a meteor falls from the sky, cracking the ground before them.  The vehicle swerves and topples over, barely missing the edge of a cliff.

Hubb recovers and and crawls up out the side door.  Cher gathers Cheza in her arms and forces her bruised body to stand.

Of all things, she finds her mind drifting back to the bouquet Hubb had presented to her on their first date.  He had been so nervous back then, so stiff and formal.

“And these,” he had said, standing awkwardly to meet her at the door of her dingy flat, “are for you.”

She had blinked, hoping that the goggle marks around her eyes weren’t _too_ obvious, then taken the sheaf from him and smiled.  “Thank you, Hubb.  Just a minute.”  She had ducked quickly back inside, dumped the bouquet in water, then headed back out into the evening.

Back then, she was still in her Thesis years, and she slept more nights at her workbench than in her bed.  One night, after a particularly long inquiry, she had flicked on the lights to find that the flowers had long since died and desiccated and were beginning to crumble into the glass in which she had left them.

Somehow, the pathetic sight had struck her as terribly funny.  Everything about Hubb had been funny to her, back then.  She had had to stifle chuckles as she threw the sorry mess out, trying not to wake her neighbors at the odd hour.  She would not have found it so humorous had she known then what she knows now—that those flowers, drooping and neglected, never to bear fruit, were the silent heralds of a future doomed from the start.

She hopes—is it permissible to hope, at the end of the world?—that things will be different this time.  Carefully, she offers her ex-husband the bundle containing the flower maiden and hopes for a better ending.

“Hubb,” she enjoins him, not feeling the wreckage shift beneath her feet, “take her.”

**Author's Note:**

> Cher is so wonderful. When I first watched _Wolf’s Rain_ , she was my favorite character. She isn’t anymore (Quent has taken over that spot), but she’s still my _second favorite_. She’s this great mix of being ambitious about the externals—inquiries into science and mythology—but ambivalent and uncertain about the interpersonal. (As opposed to Hubb, who is consumed by the personal and is only forced to take a hard look at the world around him through his search for Cher.) There’s a lot of gravitas to her character—she refuses to admit with her head what she knows with her heart, up until the end, when she has to confront the terrible truth that her body and instincts have been telling her all along. Great character writing.


End file.
